We investigate the appointments of directors and CEOs of 439 private Swedish firms during afive-year period before they successfully completed an IPO. We utilize detailed Swedish data to explore how a firm?s governance appointments evolve in the period prior to a successful IPO. Our data contains complete information about all individual decision-makers of all Swedish private limited firms, making it possible for us to track all governance appointments among IPO firms, and use matched non-IPO firms to discern what can uniquely be attributed to the IPO process. We document that 70% of the incumbent IPO directors were appointed during the five-year periodprior to the IPO, and more than half were appointed one year before the IPO date. We further find that IPO firms are more likely to appoint new directors compared to matched firms during the period leading up to the IPO. Focusing on the IPO firms, we find that firms aiming for the main market appoint directors earlier in the process compared to firms aiming for lower-tier markets. Finally, we find that firms that appoint a larger proportion of directors are more likely to appoint a new CEO before completing an IPO. This result holds regardless of what market the firms successfully completed the IPO.